The March of Fools

Watch for

• Long-hair inspections and other campus crackdowns make authoritarianism bodily and immediate; the state’s power is felt through grooming rules and public humiliation before it becomes abstract politics.
• Bicycles, highways and the sea recur as images of movement, but the freedom they promise is fragile. Watch how journeys repeatedly end in return, separation or exhaustion.
• Song Chang-sik’s music carries the emotional energy of youth culture while also bearing the history of censorship; songs associated with the film were themselves restricted after release.
• The humor often targets the protagonists themselves. Ha avoids sanctifying his students, which makes their despair more credible and their small rebellions more recognizably human.

Production notes

The film's surviving form is inseparable from censorship. Film at Lincoln Center reports that more than thirty minutes were lost across the script and print stages. The currently circulated 2K remaster used by FLC runs 103 minutes, while longer archival runtimes also exist. Ha Gil-jong brought an unusual international film education to 1970s Korean commercial cinema: after training at UCLA, he returned home and became associated with the Young Sang Shi Dae, or Era of the Image, movement. The March of Fools was adapted from Choi In-ho’s writing and produced under the Yushin system, where censorship shaped the film before and after shooting. KOFA’s Blu-ray materials preserve censorship documents, excised material and the original screenplay, while Film at Lincoln Center reports that more than thirty minutes were lost across script and print stages. Even the soundtrack became politically charged: Song Chang-sik’s “Why Are You Calling” and “Whale Hunting” were banned because of their associations with youth protest. KOFA digitally mastered the film in 2013; the recent 2K remaster shown by Film at Lincoln Center runs 103 minutes.

Trivia

• Ha Gil-jong studied film at UCLA before returning to Korea, bringing direct exposure to American New Cinema into a heavily regulated domestic industry.
• More than thirty minutes were lost to censorship across screenplay and finished-print stages, according to Film at Lincoln Center’s presentation of the remaster.
• KOFA’s Blu-ray release includes censor documents, censored clips and the original screenplay, turning the edition into a record of state intervention as well as the film itself.
• Song Chang-sik’s “Why Are You Calling” and “Whale Hunting” became inseparable from the film’s youth-culture identity and were later banned because of associations with protest.
• Ha died in 1979 at only thirty-seven after making seven features; later retrospectives have treated him as a tragically brief but crucial modernizing force in Korean cinema.

Legacy

The film became a generational touchstone and one of the strongest surviving expressions of Korean 1970s countercultural cinema. Its damaged/censored textual history is part of its meaning: what survives is also evidence of the system that attempted to control it. Its #6 position is intentionally high because the 1970s would otherwise be too easy to reduce to a transition period between the Golden Age and the New Korean Cinema. This film makes that decade feel alive from inside youth culture. The March of Fools survived as both a beloved generational memory and a damaged artifact of censorship. That double legacy matters: audiences remembered its youthfulness, music and humor, while archival work later exposed how aggressively the state had shaped what they were allowed to see. Ha’s reputation consequently grew after his early death, with institutions such as the Harvard Film Archive and Film at Lincoln Center positioning him as a missing link between Korean studio cinema and later New Wave experimentation. The film also preserves a version of 1970s political experience centered on ordinary student life rather than on retrospectively monumental events. Its influence is less a matter of direct imitation than of possibility—it showed that commercial Korean cinema could absorb international modernist energy, contemporary music and youth frustration without abandoning popular appeal. In a canon often dominated by the 1960s and post-1988 renaissance, it gives the 1970s a vivid center of gravity.